Our Previous Kickstarter Projects

What's This Anyway?

In 2015, we put out a book of religion-themed comics. As a bonus reward, we completely rewrote The Bible, abridged down to a few sentences or less per chapter.

To our surprise, the mini-Bible ended up being one of the most popular books we'd ever published. So, when Kickstarter contacted us about remixing an old item for Kickstarter Gold, it was the first thing that sprang to mind.

Rather than just reworking an old project, we wanted to do something 100% new. So, the logical next step was to abridge science. All of it.

In this new book, every major field of science is summarized in a small section, containing the history, major insights, specific subdisciplines, and recent developments of that field. We also provide at least one important chart for each branch of science.

Here are some examples from the book:

The books are both 4x4.5 inches. The mini-Bible is 67 pages, and we expect the mini science book to come in at 68 pages. Both books can be used as hats in case of emergency.

What Are the Reward Levels?

eBook Pack: For $10 you get the eBooks for both of our mini-books - The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness and Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness

Science Mini-Book: For $12 you get both a physical and an eBook copy of Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness.

Mini-Book Two-Pack: For $20 you get eBooks and physical editions of both of our mini-books - The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness and Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness

Soonish Pack of Awesomeness: For $30 you get everything in the Mini-Book Two-Pack PLUS a copy of my new book on weird science and tech, Soonish. And, all three will come SIGNED.

Soonish Pack of Awesomeness - UK Edition: For $30 you get everything in the Soonish Pack of Awesomeness, but with the UK localization of Soonish. It's got fancy spellings of words like "colour." Only ships to UK backers!

Who Are You?

Oh, right. Hi. If you aren't familiar with my work, my name's Zach Weinersmith, and I'm best known for creating a comic called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It's about science, math, books, philosophy, butt jokes, and other nerd stuff.

I also produce a live show called The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, and I recently wrote a children's book called Augie and the Green Knight.

Soonish? What's Soonish?

It's a new popular science book, written by Zach and his wife, Dr. Kelly Weinersmith. Soonish is about the weird science and technology that might make life great or ruin everything. There are also lots of strange science stories and studies, and over 100 comic strips to add a little humor. Kelly conducted interviews with dozens of top scientists in fields ranging from mathematical origami to gene editing to asteroid mining to organ market economics. To find out more, go here. Or, to find out more via podcast, go here.

"But what's Soonish doing in this Kickstarter?" you ask.

Okay, real talk. Soonish is coming out through Penguin Random House this October. Normally, we wouldn't do any book releases in the meantime, because we'd really like people to focus on our major project for the year.

But, we really wanted to be part of Kickstarter Gold, AND we really liked the idea of doing another mini-book.

So, Penguin has kindly and awesomely agreed to work with us and Kickstarter. We want to make sure we're still promoting Soonish, while also offering something awesome for Kickstarter Gold.

In short, here's what we're doing: You can get a signed copy of Soonish (which normally retails for $30) plus our two mini-books (which will eventually retail for $12 each) for just $30 plus shipping.

That's $54 worth of nerdy goodness for just $30. And, that doesn't even count the several cents of value that Zach's signature confers on the books.

Does Buying this Amazing Deal in Any Way Support Independent Bookstores

Wow, what a weirdly specific question.

But, since you asked... YES! All American editions of Soonish will be purchased through Strand Bookstore in NYC - one of the greatest bookstores in the entire world. It's thanks to their generosity that we can offer such a low price point for all three books. If you're in NYC and haven't gone yet, we encourage you to check out their famed "18 Miles of Books."

HOLY COW IT'S STRETCH GOALS

We want to make sure these books get shipped quickly, so we're not offering any modifications to the final product. Thus, Lord help us, for every 500 backers, Zach will draw a bonus update for SMBC. And, for the purposes of stretch goals, buyers of Soonish packs will count double.

These updates will be in addition to the updates already achieved by backers of Soonish via other channels. Basically, Zach hates his drawing hand, and he wants to see it suffer.

A Note for UK Supporters

First, sorry your shipping is a bit high! Here's what's up – in order to supply your packs, we have to make the minibooks in the US, ship them to a distributor in the UK, bundle them with the UK edition of the book, then ship them to you.

As with the US edition, because we're so eager for people to buy Soonish, we're knocking the price as low as we can. Even with the shipping cost, this is a substantial savings over the cost of getting all three books later.

Regarding signatures - unfortunately, we can't easily ship ourselves to the UK, much as we would like to drink your beer and eat your Victoria sponge. Thus, we can't personally sign the books. However, we will be supplying you with signed bookplates. And, we will be on a Soonish book tour in the UK in November 2017 if you want our grubby little handwriting all over your book.

Regarding Other International Versions

Soonish will be printed in various translations, but unfortunately we are not able to provide those through this Kickstarter.

We realize some of you may only want the book in a language other than English. If so, you may want to skip buying via this Kickstarter. Soonish will eventually be available in the following languages:

German

Chinese (in both China and Taiwan)

Korean

Russian

Arabic

Portuguese (Brazil)

Thank You!

Thank you to everyone supporting us, and to everyone who has supported us in the past! It's always an honor to write for you geeks, and thanks to your generosity, we should be able to do it for years to come.

Risks and challenges

The biggest challenge we face is coordinating shipping, since we'll be working with two different sources of books. At a slight cut to our profits, we've made it so that all the books will go to a central warehouse, where they will be signed, then shipped. We expect this will minimize problems.

We have done 6 kickstarters in the past, and we have completed all of them to satisfaction. Given that this is a comparatively simple project, with all offerings coming from known suppliers, we expect there will be minimal difficulty completing things on time.